We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in the Financial Times (sorry, subscription required to get to the link) that normal competitive pressures to improve service are not working in the British airports industry. The privatised British Airports Authority, now owned by Spanish based group Ferrovial, has nothing much to gain, he argues, from improving security because it gets no real benefit in terms of consumer response, but it does have an incentive to boost profits through cost cuts, which must, he says, come into conflict with security. Does he have a point?
The way in which BAA operates seems to me to be, at first glance, greatly influenced by government and its regulatory agencies, so I think it would be hard to come down too much on BAA’s neck in this case. The regulatory environment surrounding the current security furore is largely driven by government and looks likely to remain so. So it is probably academic to speculate how security would operate in a ‘pure’ free market environment. If it were possible for people to shop around for different levels of security, it would be interesting to see how businesses would responsd. If airlines could directly negotiate their own security policies with the customer without having to mediate via an airport business or government, then you might get an interesting spectrum. Some airlines would market themselves as high-security, enforcing tough checks on passengers, banning certain types of luggage. If you want to fly on such an airline, fine. Other airlines might go for a more relaxed approach, and passengers would fly in the knowledge that they were taking more of a chance in exchange for not having to put up with intrusive security. Come to that, I am in favour of busineses such as child-free airlines, for reasons spelled out by Jeff Randall recently).
And even if BAA were to remain dominant as an airports landowner, if passenger numbers dropped off alarmingly due to heavy-handed security and massive delays, then sooner or later shareholders of BAA would revolt, or sell the business, and new entrants to the airports business would offer something better. The problem with this subject of course is that we have become so used to the idea of a whole network of big airports being run by one former state-established company that it is sometimes hard to imagine something different. But it could change and there is plenty of thinking that can and should be done on how to use the incentives of the market to improve passenger service and give people the security they want.
Some related thoughts about airports and privatisation issues here.
The spoof post below about how the wretched Tory leader ‘Dave’ Cameron might react to the case for abolishing inheritance tax – a thoroughly good idea – prompted some commentators to wonder about the UK media. It reminded me of an old quote attributed to the late British broadcaster, Brian Redhead, who is supposed to have said (I paraphrase):
“The Times is read by people who run the country. The Daily Telegraph is read by people who fear we are being run by the French; the Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country, while the Daily Mirror is read by people who delusionally think they run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Sun is read by people who do not care who runs the country so long as she has very large tits.”
The ‘end-times’ must be upon us. Former Labour cabinet minister, Stephen Byers, has just said something with which I agree: abolish inheritance tax.
American judge Alex Kozinski, interviewed recently in U.S. magazine Reason, is roughly billed as a ‘libertarian’ judge. He is asked, among various things, for his views on the infamous Kelo eminent domain decision, which relates to the case in which a local municipality in the States won the power to evict people from their own homes in order to redevelop a site for commercial and tax-raising reasons. It is a decision which has scandalised classical liberals and defenders of property rights. Yet Kozinski thinks the decision is fine, and comes up with the following jaw-dropper:
What’s the difference between taking property for public roads or anything else? Do only public automobiles travel on public roads? I don’t understand why it’s a problem. If the government thinks the city will benefit by having a road there instead of having your house so that people can drive their private cars on it, then it has to make that decision. Who owns the road really doesn’t matter. What matters is that it makes it easier for other people to get from point A to point B using their private vehicles for private purposes. You could say “but it’s my house and my private purpose is more important than your private purpose.” But we live in a society.
“We live in society”. And so what? This judge is using ‘society’ as a sort of mystical incantation to shut down debate. His argument seems in broad terms to be a sort of utilitarian one: if the interests of a supposed majority are served by seizing the property of some people, then this is okay so long as ‘fair’ compensation is paid. His argument seems not to accept that though certain outcomes may be desirable, that it is necessary for the state to be constrained by certain long-term rules and institutions, most emphatically, by the existence of property rights. The judge’s position seems to be “property rights be damned”. If we imagine there are alternate uses of property that might put a gleam in the eye of a politician with property developers in his back pocket, then there is no limit to the assaults on property rights that could be permitted under the Kozinski formulation.
Eminent domain – what we Brits call compulsory purchase – can be justified, if at all, for creating certain facilities like a road, military base or law court that are essential for the peaceful ordering of a society, essential for human life and in the interests of all, and not just because it makes life a bit nicer for some or most of us, whether we be motorists or whatever. What is terrible about the Kelo decision is that it was driven by commercial gain, not a clear public interest such as defence of the realm.
After all, if the economic pie really is swelled by people selling their homes for new development, then that would happen in a market, albeit perhaps not in the neat and tidy way favoured by power-grabbing government official. Yet this ‘libertarian’ judge cannot see that. May we be preserved from ‘libertarian’ judges like this.
For an excellent book about this subject, see this work by Timothy Sandefur.
As an aside, I should point out that the reason I keep focusing on this issue is because American legal rulings and arguments have a habit of travelling across the Big Pond.
I have never been to the Edinburgh Festival, which has been, over the years, a launchpad for standup comedians and musicians such as Denis Leary. James Glassman, who went to the event this year, observes that Jew-bashing and “gags” about the Holocaust is going down a storm. Quite what that says about the organisers and the clientele, heaven only knows. Being an ardent defender of free speech, Glassman rightly points out that the way to deal with jerks like the “comedian” mentioned its contempt. I hope a fair amount of contempt is indeed delivered.
A while ago I briefly referred to a book by Simon Winder about Britain in the decades immediately following the Second World War. The book takes the idiosyncratic approach of looking at post-war Britain through the prism of Ian Fleming’s James Bond adventures. I cursorily flicked through the pages and it appeared to be an amusing and quite cleverly-done piece of work. Winder seems to have added something fresh to what is already a crowded cottage history of Bond studies. Winder’s book, at first glance, looked like a zany and rather affectionate recollection of what it was like to grow up as a young English middle class boy in the era of Meccano toys, WW2 comics and James Bond film premieres.I can identify with some of Winder’s own upbringing and views. So I bought the book and sat down to read it to pass away a few hours. What I read was in fact rather different, more serious and more annoying than what I had expected.
Winder makes a lot of astute points about post-war British history but a lot of his book is spoiled by an insistent, splenetic hatred of the English upper classes and Britain’s colonial history. He is determined to lay it on a bit thick, in the manner of a rather earnest sixth-former trying to creep up to his leftwing history master.
In fairness, he does grasp how Britain, victorious in the war but materially and financially shattered, rapidly lost its global position, overtaken not just by the already-mighty USA but also by France, West Germany and Japan. While Konrad Adenauer was helping to turn the devastated western half of Germany into an economic dynamo – with a little help from Hayek-influenced economics minister Ludwig Erhard – Britain built its ‘New Jerusalem’ of a welfare state, nationalised industries, crushingly-high income taxes, currency controls and a still-heavy military spending burden. Winder gives an easy pass to the Labour government after 1945 and is savage to the Tories under the elderly Churchill and his deputy, Anthony Eden. For Winder, the Tories are a bunch of old pin-stripped duffers more used to shooting grouse in the Scottish highlands than wrestling with Britain’s supposedly rightful position as a meek European power. His attacks on the Tories seem to be more about their accents and backgrounds than on what they actually did or did not, do. He misses the chance to make what I think is the really serious charge against the Tories of the time, as made for example by historian Andrew Roberts in Eminent Churchillians: these men failed to even make the slightest dent in the Attlee socialist creation. They accepted, for example, the trade union legal privileges and regulations that helped pave the way for the economic near-collapse in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is a harsh charge, but Winder does not make it as it would not, I think, occur to him to do so if my judgement of his political views is accurate. → Continue reading: An entertaining but infuriating book about British post-war history
If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.
– Kingsley Amis.
The news that one is not even allowed to take anything as threatening as a book on an aircraft or a bottle of Evian water – unless bought from an overpriced airport shop, no doubt – got me thinking about how the more customer-conscious airlines might try and deal with this. Millions of businessmen and women, for example, take stuff like laptop computers and documents to read on a trip to and from their meetings. These folk often pay business class rates and are valuable customers. I fly around Europe a fair deal to business meetings and it would seriously mess up my work life if I was not able to read anything on a trip. If I am forced to put my laptop in the main luggage, there is always the risk that the machine gets broken (this is no minor problem). It is also a real problem if people cannot take water with them to drink on flights, since flying typically is dehydrating and makes jetlag worse. These may appear niggling issues but actually they make a lot of difference to whether folk will fly or take other forms of transport. So what are the airlines to do?
Well, for a start, an airline could have a bunch of laptops in the aircraft and offer people the chance to use them, simply by giving them a disk which they can use to download stuff they want from their own machines and then use in a machine provided by the airline. If the overhead lockers are no longer needed for handluggage, then perhaps that free space could be filled with books, drinks, iPods, and other gadgets to help folk pass the time.
Flying is being turned into an experience in which passengers, even though they are paying customers, are treated as near-criminals. It is no excuse for the airlines to shrug their shoulders and blame all of this on the security services. They must think of imaginative ways to make travelling as pleasant as possible in the current worrying security environment. If they do not do so, then frankly they can expect little sympathy from me if they subsequently experience financial troubles. We must not, and cannot, let the nihilist losers of radical Islam bring our lives to a halt. Remember: the best revenge is to live well.
This standup comic nicely sums up what I think of the dip-shit worldview of Islamic homicide bombers. (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan).
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
Alexis de Tocqueville.
In her ill-judged attack on global capitalism, Naomi Klein decried the phenomenon of the corporate logo. One of the sillinesses of this is that logos and brands are essentially bound up with the reputation of a firm. A firm that has a strong brand, a strong reputation for honesty, quality and high service may have taken years, decades even, to aquire it. It can take only days to lose such a reputation through stupidity or dishonesty. That is why reputation is a protection for the consumer. Statists who imagine that we need all manner of regulations to protect consumers against shysters routinely forget this point. A firm that wants to make a whacking great profit is unlikely to deliberately harm or even kill, its customers. Self-interest dictates that a firm that wants to make money over the long term will work like hell to ensure its reputation is deserved. (It may be debateable whether limited liability either enhances or weakens this process, but I have not the time to explore that here).
I got thinking along these lines following the recent mess that has unfolded at Reuters, thanks entirely to sharp-eyed bloggers spotting something funny about photographs. Reuters is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, news service in the world. It both provides information directly to clients such as traders via its screens, offering real-time news alerts, and also wholesale news, providing text and photographs to newspapers and broadcasters. The company – founded by central European aristocrat Baron Julius Reuter – has employed some of the bravest and sharpest journalists in the business, not to mention folk who went on to forge careers in television like Sandy Gall or even thriller writers like Frederick Forsyth and Ian Fleming.
So what has happened over the photo scandal has the whiff of tragedy as well as farce. Its reputation has been badly damaged by the photo scandal. My sources at the firm realise that the situation cannot be shrugged off and it appears this will not happen. Good. The organisation deserves credit for immediately axing the jerk who doctored photographs to make a situation look more exciting and therefore marketable than it was. The whole back-catalogue of this person’s work has been taken down. Reuter’s head of editorial, David Schlesinger – no stranger to speaking his mind about matters – is certainly like to crack the whip, although I am not yet aware that senior managers’ heads may roll because of what has happened. (Stay tuned).
It is a shame in some ways since the company has been recovering financially over the past couple of years. Reuters’ profitability was hammered after the end of the dotcom boom in 2000. Bloated and complacent after the boom years in foreign exchange and equity markets during the 80s and 90s, Reuters’ lost ground to firms like Bloomberg. Bloomberg’s snazzy news and bond-dealing boxes and add-on features enticed away thousands of clients. And yet under new CEO Tom Glocer, the company started to fight back, halting the exodus of clients, simplifying its product range. It left its old HQ in Fleet Street and moved to a gleaming new office in Canary Wharf.
To fight back from this, senior management must show no mercy if there are further signs of this sort of nonsense. If they do not take a hard line, one can be sure business rivals like Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal will be ready to pounce.
A number of bookshops in Britain seem to be selling reproductions of the advisory books that were given to Allied servicemen readying for D-Day in 1944 and for U.S. Army Air Force personnel arriving in Britain in 1942. I bought a copy of the latter and it is, in its way, a wonderful snapshot of how Britain was viewed by Americans more than 60 years ago and makes me wonder if many of the descriptions could still apply. The book is called Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain. Here’s a couple of paragraphs:
“A British woman officer or non-commissioned officer can – and often does – give orders to a man private. The men obey smartly and know it is no shame. For British women have proven themselves in this way… Now you know why British soldiers respect the women in uniform. When you see a girl in khaki or air-force blue with a bit of ribbon on her tunic – remember she didn’t get it for knitting more socks than anyone else in Ipswich.”
“Do not be offender if Britishers do not pay as full respects to national or regimental colours as Americans do. The British do not treat the flag as such an important symbol as we do. But they pay more frequent respect to their national anthem. In peace or war “God Save the King” (to the same tune as “Our America”) is played at the conclusion of all public gatherings such as theatre performances. The British consider it bad form not to stand at attention, even if it means missing the last bus. If you are in ahurry, leave before the national anthem is played. That’s considered alright.”
The book is printed from the original typescript that was used by the War Department in the States. Some of the descriptions now may strike us as a sort of cozy, simplified portrayal, but actually I was rather impressed by the strenuous efforts of the author(s) to describe the privations of a nation at war, its habits, differences and qualities (I love its descriptions of attitudes to sport). It also struck me that the US authorities clearly felt it was necessary to take steps to educate servicemen and women a bit about the people they would be meeting as allies in the war against Hitler. While those who have reprinted the book may think they are making some sort of clever-dick post-modernist point by re-issuing these things, I find them rather moving.
By coincidence, on the same day that I bought the book, I drove up to see friends in Cambridgeshire. About a few miles away from the house of my friends, I passed by a rather neat row of hedges, screening a rather fine little white-washed building. The Stars and Stripes were flying from a masthead. I slowed down and realised that it was one of the cemeteries to commemorate the U.S. aircrews who flew hundreds of missions from the flatlands of East Anglia in aircraft such as B-17 Flying Fortresses or P-51 Mustangs. There were hundreds of such airbases, some of which are now either just strips of busted concrete in a wheatfield, although a few preserved airfields remain, complete with the old control towers and huts. On my father’s farm in Suffolk we used to find the odd .50 shell case that had been ejected from a passing aircraft. Chuck Yeager, the legendary U.S. Mustang fighter jock and test pilot, flew from Leiston, a few miles away from my old home.
Some of the men who lie in the soil of Cambridgeshire probably had read that guidebook and wondered about the country they were operating from all those years ago. At a time when cheap anti-American bromides fill up the airwaves and newsprint, it is no bad thing to reflect on the debt we ‘Britishers’ owe to those who came over to this island in 1942. May they all rest in peace.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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